Scaling Up Learning
In the mid-fifties when GE was expanding its operations across the globe, the president of GE, Ralph Cordiner decided to set up a corporate university. An hour away from New York spread over 59 acres, in 1956 GE offered its first course that spread over 13 weeks. Today no executive can imagine spending a full quarter of the year sitting in a classroom. While the courses that are offered at Crotonville have become shorter, the efficacy of the investment remains unquestionable. The headhunters refer to GE as a leadership factory.
Across Businesses and Sectors
GE is not alone. McDonalds set up its Hamburger University in 1961. When Steve Jobs hired Joe Podolny, the then dean of Yale to start Apple University in 2008 it made a big splash. Apple University drew faculty members include professors from universities like Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT.The trend of corporate universities is on the rise. The companies have a large employee base that ranges from 8,000 to 300,000 employees or more. They cut across sectors and businesses from automobiles to pharma and everything else in between. General Motors Institute, Caterpillar, Unilever, GDF Sueze, Veolia, Axa, Sanofi, Novartis, Petronas, and many more.In 1993, corporate universities existed in only 400 companies. By 2001, this number had increased to 2,000, including Walt Disney, Boeing, and Motorola. According to BCG, there are estimated to be more than 4,000 companies with formal corporate universities.
Scale, Speed and Complexity
As the employee base increases, the organization faces the need to deliver its product or service in a uniform manner. As more management layers get formed and the organizations get geographically dispersed there is a need to bind the employees with some uniform practices. The founders can no longer get involved in teaching people the process or share the vision, then that is usually the trigger for some formal classes being delivered.
Scale: McDonalds serves 68 million customers daily in 119 countries across 35,000 outlets. This complexity requires training. That ensures that McDonalds burgers taste the same from Mumbai to Moscow.Complexity: When surgeons move to the operating theater they rely on check-lists. These lists reduce human errors, and help the surgeon to operate with speed without having to stop and double check if they are missing any step. In performing complex tasks through collaborating teams, speed comes through training in standard processes and procedures. Apple University teaches employees that they're at the company to be the very best at one specific task.Corporate Governance: Governance needs the ability to manage reporting relationships, finances, and facilities. Compliance and risk management demand investments in training. On any given day two billion people use Unilever products across countries that have different rules and regulations. This scale and complexity demands constant investment to ensure standards are not compromised.Education: Entry level hires are drawn from a wide variety of educational backgrounds. There is a need to bring people to a common minimum level of knowledge and skills. From technical skills or domain knowledge or personal competencies, people need to keep upgrading.Values and Culture: The leaders need to be role models of the values the company proclaims. When the majority of employee responses to everyday situations becomes uniform, it forms the culture of the organization. Tying the professional development to strategic challenges is a strong reason to invest in training.The culture of the organization has to support its vision and strategy. This needs a place when people can come together and connect with others and learn. Technical training can be delivered through e-learning modules. It is the intangibles like culture that needs people to learn from role models.
Training or Learning
When the business environment is stable, the focus is on training. There are set procedures that need to be followed as per the manual. Formal, structured training delivered in a standardized module with certified trainers has been mainstay of knowledge transfer. The employer has the responsibility to ensure knowledge transfer. Training effectiveness is easy to measure through before and after studies. The return on investment is easily calculated when the input and output are both tangible.When the business model becomes turbulent and dynamic, as it has happened in recent times, the need to constantly upgrade one’s knowledge has become critical. The responsibility for learning has moved from the employer to the employee. Relying on the company becomes inefficient. Formal opportunities to learn are always rationed and never timely enough simply because learning is never built in to any person’s daily routine.
Accelerators
Technology: Today people have a surfeit of options to start learning on their own. MOOCs are offered by the top colleges and top professors. They are free. Social media sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare etc are all making user generated content accessible to anyone or any subject, anywhere. Today anyone can create content and store it in the cloud. This is then accessible any time and across a variety of devices. Learning is an individual process. We all learning at different paces and in different ways. Technology makes it possible to customize and personalize the learning experience.Policies: I know of a software company that had a policy that encouraged people to pay for any courses or programs on their own. If that upgraded skill (eg learning to program in a new language) was used by the company they would reimburse the full fee and top it up with a small bonus to reward the employee for being proactive in upgrading himself.Individuals: Sharing content or “Working Out Loud” on any social platform can trigger many others to learn. Last May, the CEO of Wipro posted a blog about the impact of 3D printers. That evoked many responses. One of them was from a 26 year old employee who wrote how he had taught himself how to build a 3D printer. And then proceeded to post videos of how he had done it. Thus inspiring a host of others to follow his example – something that would be hard to replicate in a formal structure.
In Conclusion
Every year almost 800 entrepreneurs get funding for their ideas. Barely 10% of them survive. All of them have dreams of scaling up the venture. They almost never think of how to scale up the learning challenges of their venture. When faced with the dilemma of whether to make or buy talent they always vote in favor of buy.Built into the challenge of scale and speed – the two great predictors of success in a digital environment – is the need for crafting a learning strategy that changes to reflect the business needs. Everyone does not to build a corporate university with a sprawling campus, especially if the employee base is not in the same city. It can be a virtual university as many companies do.Expertise is the greatest differentiator in a knowledge economy. Organizations have to come to terms with it.---------------------Join me on twitter @AbhijitBhaduriWritten for People Matters Aug 2015 <click here>Want to use the sketchnote in your presentations? <download it>